Davis Cup Returns to a Scene of Its Grassy Past

MELBOURNE, Australia — It will be the United States versus Australia in the first round of Davis Cup this week at Kooyong Stadium.

Nostalgia will be obligatory, even if the brash young Australian star Nick Kyrgios does not yet seem much like the nostalgic type.

Jim Courier, the United States’ Davis Cup captain, said: “I think the guys will feel the ghosts. I’ll push a few buttons with our guys and see what registers. But I don’t think, when you walk into Kooyong, you can avoid the history, don’t think you can ignore it. It’s a big part of why we’re there.”

Kooyong’s horseshoe-shaped tennis temple, completed in 1927, was at the heart of the sport for decades: the site of memorable Davis Cup finals when clean-cut Americans and Australians ruled the game. Its grass courts were also home to the Australian Open from 1972 to 1987.

But grass-court tennis, Davis Cup and the Aussie-American tennis rivalry are not what they used to be, and the Open decamped in 1988, abandoning the eastern suburbs for downtown Melbourne, where it has grown exponentially, marketed itself globally and built three stadiums with retractable roofs.

The atmospheric club it left behind seems quaint and cramped by comparison: wedged between the old train line and the newer freeway, rather like an elegant historic home that has been encroached upon by modern developments.

Just as it is now hard to imagine that the West Side Tennis Club once had sufficient elbow room to stage the United States Open, it is tough to visualize Kooyong as a Grand Slam showcase, even though it might well have remained so if its club members in the early 1980s had shown more enthusiasm for retaining the privilege.

Image

The Australians after defeating the Swedes to win the Davis Cup at Kooyong in 1986.CreditTony Feder/Getty Images

“Look, there was a need for a new venue,” Chris Brown, chief executive of the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club, said last month. “Melbourne Park is just a fabulous center, and the facilities and services there are sensational.

“To have created that out here, remote to the city, wouldn’t have been as good as where it is now. And the fact of it is, by the Open moving there, it has returned this club to being an absolutely top-notch tennis club that serves the needs of a large number of members. In that sense, you have to say it was a win-win.”

The remodeled Kooyong facility has more than 8,000 members, a squash facility, an indoor pool and a well-equipped gymnasium, whose picture windows provide a sweeping view of 26 grass courts, which remain the club’s main attraction — even if there are also 22 clay courts to provide a reliable playing surface through the chillier, rainier winter months.

“The grass courts are unbelievable — the best in the world, in my view, outside Wimbledon,” said Paul McNamee, a former Australian star and the Australian Open tournament director who grew up playing at Kooyong.

But for now at least, the club’s grass-court count has increased by one. The Kooyong Stadium surface was converted to a hardcourt in the 1990s in order to make its annual exhibition tournament, the Kooyong Classic, a more attractive warm-up option for players who were preparing to compete on hardcourts at the Australian Open.

But Kooyong Stadium has been run through a time machine for this week’s Davis Cup match against the United States with the installation of a portable grass court.

“Well, we cover all surfaces here,” Brown said about having to reinstall grass at Kooyong. “It’s a little strange, though. I can take your point.”

Brown said the concrete shell of the stadium did not look much different from the way it did in 1987, when Stefan Edberg and Hana Mandlikova won the final Australian Open singles titles at Kooyong. There are still green wooden benches, still seat numbers painted in white, and a plaque that states, “This stand was declared open by Norman E. Brookes, president of the Lawn Tennis Association of Victoria, on January 22, 1927.”

Image

The Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis during a singles match at the Kooyong Classic in January.CreditMal Fairclough/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Brookes was Melbourne’s and Australia’s most successful early tennis champion. In 1907, he became the first non-Briton to win Wimbledon; he was also the leader of the first Australasian team to win the Davis Cup (in those days, Australia played with New Zealand).

Brookes, who played on six Davis Cup-winning teams, later played a major role in the development of Kooyong, a suburb whose name comes from the Aboriginal word kooyongkoot, which means “the haunt of the wildfowl.”

The increasing popularity of the game led the Lawn Tennis Association of Victoria to look for more room, and though other sites were examined, the group eventually settled on the purchase of 17 acres at Kooyong for $6,160 in Australian dollars, with the understanding that it would have to spend a great deal more than that to drain the marshy land.

The first Australian Championships were played in the new stadium in 1927, and it should come as no surprise to those who follow the modern tournament that the final was played in brutal heat. Gerald Patterson beat Jack Hawkes in an epic match, saving five match points before prevailing, 3-6, 6-4, 3-6, 18-16, 6-3.

It was the first of many classics at Kooyong, where everyone from Don Budge and Maureen Connolly to Rod Laver and Margaret Court to Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert made their marks. But Kooyong’s ghosts are not simply tennis champions. Led Zeppelin played in the stadium in 1972 in a performance interrupted by a storm; the Rolling Stones came the year after and gave two concerts in one day in February. There were also annual visits by the Harlem Globetrotters, as well as boxing matches and other diversions.

But the neighborhood eventually put a stop to the rock ’n’ roll, and once the Open left for downtown, there was serious consideration given to demolishing the seldom-used stadium.

“Perilously close,” McNamee said. “It would have been a tragedy, but now it’s heritage-listed, and events like Davis Cup means it’s got a better chance of staying here.”

Kooyong has staged 10 Davis Cup contests, beginning in 1946, when the United States, led by Jack Kramer and Ted Schroeder, beat Australia, 5-0, in the challenge round when Davis Cup play resumed after World War II.

The Australians have yet to lose another one at Kooyong, and the 1953 challenge round remains for many the pièce de résistance as the teenagers Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad, known then as the Twins, made their Cup debuts and upset Tony Trabert and Vic Seixas and the Americans, 3-2, to defend the title in front of a world-record crowd of 17,500.

When Rosewall won the final match against Seixas, Australian fans hurled thousands of seat cushions onto the grass in celebration.

“I’ve been playing since I was 6 years old, but this is the first time I’ve been beaten by two babies and an old fox,” Trabert said at the closing ceremony, referring to the Twins and their crusty captain, Harry Hopman.

It has been 10 years now since Kooyong hosted a Davis Cup match: a quarterfinal victory over Belarus in 2006 that was played on a hardcourt.

But this will be the Americans on grass and the first United States-Australia match since 1999, when a teenage Lleyton Hewitt helped beat the Americans in the quarterfinals at another traditional site: Longwood Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Hewitt, now 34 and just retired, will be making his debut as Australia’s captain, with Australian tennis back on the rise and showcasing young men like Bernard Tomic and, above all, the combustible and flashy Kyrgios.

“It’s got enormous history, that court,” McNamee said. “It’s the spiritual home of Australian tennis. That’s what the club will tell you, but it’s true.”

Next week, the spiritual home will come out of hibernation to play a contemporary role.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP4 of the New York edition with the headline: In Stadium Built in 1927, Davis Cup Returns to a Scene of Its Grassy Past . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe